Methodology for sensor calibration in agro-industrial facilities

The rising need of precision in several sectors, agriculture included, brings to the development of new monitoring systems customised for the specific application. These systems often take advantages of probes offered by the market, however, the integration between market probes and home-built systems, requires tests to validate the recorded measurements.This paper provides a methodology to perform a calibration procedure when the probes fail the validation test.The results show the comparison of the measurements collected by investigated sensors and reference sensor coupled with the application of simple correlation methods can bring to an improvement of the sensor precision as far as to pass the validation test

Microventilation system improves the ageing conditions in existent wine cellars

Background and Aims: The importance of indoor environmental conditions in a cellar is well known and continuously investigated. The process of wine ageing consists of several steps, during which temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH) play a fundamental role as the quality of the final product is strongly related to stable and suitable environmental conditions. Critical factors, such as mould growth or wine evaporation, have emerged when ventilation has proved to be insufficient or poorly designed. The limitation of stagnant areas and the homogeneity inT and RH provide for proper wine conservation; however, unwanted local conditions can occur in the zones with insufficient air exchange. Methods and Results: Considering these aspects, a controlled microventilation and monitoring system was installed in a case study cellar, and T and RH were monitored for 1 year. The data have been analysed to investigate criticalities of the environmental conditions. The ventilation was activated in specific critical conditions to increase the homogeneity of the T and RH in the critical zones. The results show that the microventilation system improves the homogeneity of both T and RH without affecting the average values. Conclusions: The study demonstrated the efficacy of the system and indicated possible modifications to improve system performance. Significance of the Study: The system proved to be a useful tool for both improving the environmental conditions and providing useful information to the winemakers about the ageing conditions

Emergency surgery for recurrent intraabdominal cancer

Recurrent abdominal cancer can manifest in many ways but there are certain situations that are a great challenge to clinicians. Emergency presentation is one such situation. Surgeons are faced with a therapeutic dilemma that on the one hand most of these patients have a limited life expectancy, and on the other surgical procedures are unavoidable. We reviewed our experience of recurrent abdominal cancers presenting with acute abdominal symptoms requiring emergency

Fine Mapping of Genetic Variants in BIN1, CLU, CR1 and PICALM for Association with Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers for Alzheimer's Disease

Recent genome-wide association studies of Alzheimer's disease (AD) have identified variants in BIN1, CLU, CR1 and PICALM that show replicable association with risk for disease. We have thoroughly sampled common variation in these genes, genotyping 355 variants in over 600 individuals for whom measurements of two AD biomarkers, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) 42 amino acid amyloid beta fragments (Aβ42) and tau phosphorylated at threonine 181 (ptau181), have been obtained. Association analyses were performed to determine whether variants in BIN1, CLU, CR1 or PICALM are associated with changes in the CSF levels of these biomarkers. Despite adequate power to detect effects as small as a 1.05 fold difference, we have failed to detect evidence for association between SNPs in these genes and CSF Aβ42 or ptau181 levels in our sample. Our results suggest that these variants do not affect risk via a mechanism that results in a strong additive effect on CSF levels of Aβ42 or ptau181

The weekend effect on the provision of Emergency Surgery before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: case–control analysis of a retrospective multicentre database

Introduction: The concept of “weekend effect”, that is, substandard healthcare during weekends, has never been fully demonstrated, and the different outcomes of emergency surgical patients admitted during weekends may be due to different conditions at admission and/or different therapeutic approaches. Aim of this international audit was to identify any change of pattern of emergency surgical admissions and treatments during weekends. Furthermore, we aimed at investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the alleged “weekend effect”. Methods: The database of the CovidICE-International Study was interrogated, and 6263 patients were selected for analysis. Non-trauma, 18+ yo patients admitted to 45 emergency surgery units in Europe in the months of March–April 2019 and March–April 2020 were included. Demographic and clinical data were anonymised by the referring centre and centrally collected and analysed with a statistical package. This study was endorsed by the Association of Italian Hospital Surgeons (ACOI) and the World Society of Emergency Surgery (WSES). Results: Three-quarters of patients have been admitted during workdays and only 25.7% during weekends. There was no difference in the distribution of gender, age, ASA class and diagnosis during weekends with respect to workdays. The first wave of the COVID pandemic caused a one-third reduction of emergency surgical admission both during workdays and weekends but did not change the relation between workdays and weekends. The treatment was more often surgical for patients admitted during weekends, with no difference between 2019 and 2020, and procedures were more often performed by open surgery. However, patients admitted during weekends had a threefold increased risk of laparoscopy-to-laparotomy conversion (1% vs. 3.4%). Hospital stay was longer in patients admitted during weekends, but those patients had a lower risk of readmission. There was no difference of the rate of rescue surgery between weekends and workdays. Subgroup analysis revealed that interventional procedures for hot gallbladder were less frequently performed on patients admitted during weekends. Conclusions: Our analysis revealed that demographic and clinical profiles of patients admitted during weekends do not differ significantly from workdays, but the therapeutic strategy may be different probably due to lack of availability of services and skillsets during weekends. The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic did not impact on this difference

University dropout prediction through educational data mining techniques: A systematic review

The dropout rates in the European countries is one of the major issues to be faced in a near future as stated in the Europe 2020 strategy. In 2017, an average of 10.6% of young people (aged 18-24) in the EU-28 were early leavers from education and training according to Eurostat’s statistics. The main aim of this review is to identify studies which uses educational data mining techniques to predict university dropout in traditional courses. In Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) catalogues, we identified 241 studies related to this topic from which we selected 73, focusing on what data mining techniques are used for predicting university dropout. We identified 6 data mining classification techniques, 53 data mining algorithms and 14 data mining tools

La valutazione tra il formale e l'informale

Il numero della rivista offre contributi centrati su elmenti formali e informali della valutazione, trattando argomenti relativi alla statistica testuale per l'analisi del contenuto, alla mediazione culturale nei musei, alla riflessione sulla validazione degli strumenti di valutazione, alle prove IEA PIRLS sulla comprensione della lettura.This issue offers contributions on formal and informal approaches to assessment, dealing with textual statistics for content analysis, cultural mediation in museums, the evaluation of validity, IEA PIRLS tests on reading comprehension

Deep learning approach for predicting university dropout: A case study at roma tre university

Based on current trends in graduation rates, 39% of today young adults on average across OECD countries are expected to complete tertiary-type A (university level) education during their lifetime. In 2017, an average of 10.6% of young people (aged 1824) in the EU-28 were early leavers from education and training. Therefore the level of dropout in the scenery of European education is one of the major issue to be faced in a near future. The main aim of the research is to predict, as early as possible, which student will dropout in the Higher Education (HE) context. The accurate knowledge of this information would allow one to effectively carry out targeted actions in order to limit the incidence of the phenomenon. The recent breakthrough on Neural Networks with the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architectures has become disruptive in AI. By stacking together tens or hundreds of convolutional neural layers, a “deep” network structure is obtained, which has been proved very effective in producing high accuracy models. In this research the administrative data of about 6000 students enrolled from 2009 in the Department of Education at Roma Tre University had been used to train a Convolutional Neural Network based. Then, the trained network provides a predictive model that predicts whether the student will dropout. Furthermore, we compared the results obtained using deep learning models to the ones using Bayesian networks. The accuracy of the obtained deep learning models ranged from 67.1% for the first-year students up to 94.3% for the third-year students

Roptured aortic aneurysm presenting as acute abdomen: particular case report

Aim: Ruptured aortic aneurysm can be tt atusc of acute abdomen. Nowadays using modern diagnostic techniques diagnosis is very easy. W'e report a particular can' of a misdiagnosed ruptured aortic aneurysm. (!ase Report: Man 65 y.o. admitted to hospital for abdominal pain and stipsis. After I week he developed acute abdomen with muscotar rigidity and mild acute anemia, hew days before contrast studies showed a sigmoid diverticular disease. At laparotomy a ruptured aortic aneurysm seated from retroperitoneal fascia and extended to abdomi na! walls up to rectus abdominis muscles tons found. Conclusions: In case of acute abdomen with muscolar rigidity and acute anemia the diagnosis of rectus abdominis muscles hematoma caused by ruptured aortic aneurysm must be considere